wtf is follow friday

Google’s autocomplete function has thrown up some pretty hilarious results in the past. Just ask an open-ended question such as: “Why are Australians…” and you’ll get the most popular search queries right there in front of you including: “so stupid”; “so rude”; and “overweight”. Google autocomplete is a multinational canvas of what the online world is talking about, so when I typed into Google “WTF is f” I was rather amused to see the above results.

Facebook is no surprise, the latest comScore results indicate that one in seven page views in the UK are dedicated to the social networking site. FTW for those jargon light users who hate acronyms is For The Win, which interestingly is also a mirror image of WTF.

Follow Friday is another kettle of fish altogether.

FollowFriday is an invention of Twitter which encourages people to, “follow friends that friends recommend.” It really is as simple as that, but the sheer volume of FollowFriday traffic leads to an exasperation of anyone not involved with it.

Facebook Friends Freak Out Every #followfriday

Some of my good friends on Facebook freaked out recently because as a Gnews editor I linked @gnewsrules tweets to my Facebook status updates. Constant FollowFriday updates confused the hell out of them. All of which lead to this article to clarify exactly: What the Fuck is #followfriday?

With over 4.5 million results in Google, the phenomenon of FollowFriday is clearly one that is being talked about a lot but not necessarily answered.

FollowFriday has become a craze on Twitter which just seems to get bigger and bigger. Every Friday, Twitter turns into #followfriday or #ff frenzy as thousands of users tweet the phrase across the globe.

Like all great ideas, FollowFriday started as a simple idea which snowballed into something much bigger than anyone could surely have imagined. The craze is so popular now that it has its own dedicated website.

The original #followfriday tweet was designed as an experiment for people to make recommendations of interesting person to follow on Twitter. Micah Baldwin began on Friday 16 January: “I am starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday, suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her.”

The beauty of FollowFriday is that it is easy to get involved, requires little effort and can be done as often as you like. So long as you put the #followfriday tag somewhere in your tweet, you can recommend one person to be followed, or a thousand!

For example: if you wanted to recommend that your friends follow the social media legends over at mashable.com you could tweet:

What is strange about the trend of FollowFriday is that it shows no sign of stopping in the near future. What could have been a brief fad has endured for ten months, and each #ff frenzy gets more intense as more people jump on the bandwagon.

At the peak of the original FollowFriday, followers were tweeting at a rate of 2 per second, and as Twitter continues to grow and FollowFriday gathers momentum, more and more people are getting involved with the game.

As FollowFriday becomes increasingly global, the influence of #ff tweets is also migrating to accommodate different timezones, with tweets now beginning in the late hours of Thursday and lasting until early Saturday.

FollowFriday is here to stay. We really hope that this clears things up; if you found this post useful, share it with your twitter friends by using this retweet button. Thanks!